You can’t open the eyes and heart of every bigot out there. You can’t make every LGBTQ kid feel loved and accepted and wanted and safe. You can’t see to it that every LGBTQ kid, all the world over, will be free to grow up and legally marry whoever the hell they fancy.

There’s no sparkly, proverbial magic wand that you can wave.

But sometimes, all you need to spark some magic, to spark some change, is a single book.

You can’t go out there and hug every one of these kids. You can’t look every one of them in the eye and tell them that you are proud to be looking them in the eye, that you are proud of them, that they deserve to be truly seen and wanted for who they are.

But you can tell them it gets better. You can show them that people out there do care.

And you can give them the kind of validation that only comes from picking a book up off the shelf and suddenly realising This book is relevant to me; this book is mine; I am holding my own life inside these pages because someone thought it important enough to write down.

You can give them hope in a tangible form. You can give them something to literally hold onto.

It’s only $25. It’s ‘only’ a book.

But the right book, in the right hands, really is maybe the closest thing to magic that this world has.

This, otherwise known as Dexter’s Law for the tiny black and white kitten beaten with a baseball bat by a woman and her two children to the point of having to be euthanised, really cannot happen soon enough. It should have happened a ridiculously long time ago, and there should never ever be another Dexter and never should have been in the first place.

But the most important thing is that it does happen, and spreads, and becomes commonplace all around the country and hopefully all around the world.

If Dexter’s story (and the thousands more like it) don’t break your damn heart enough as it is, well, use common sense. Would you be comfortable knowing that the sort of people who can bludgeon small defenseless creatures with baseball bats could be living right next door, with you and your family completely unawares?

That is what this bill, and others like it, can help prevent. (I myself once used to live next door to two charming gentlemen who went by the names of ‘Big Bub’ and ‘Lil Bub’ and apparently had quite the fondness for killing neighbourhood cats. Sadly, I am not making this up, and would have sorely loved a law like this then.)

So raise your voice. Take thirty seconds and make yourself heard — because they can’t.

And I wish I could tell all of these kids to keep their heads up. That even if their own parents might not love them the way that they deserve to be loved, there are at least people out there who would. ♥

(That story also reminds me of this wonderful little boy who is forever wandering about the childrens’ department of my store — his parents leave him with nannies, who then turn and dump him into said department and ignore him while instead he latches onto us. The first time I encountered him, he quite sincerely complimented me on my glitter nail polish, and then followed me around asking for books on both Rapunzel and sharks. On one of the most recent times I saw him, he flagged me down to inquire as to how he could go about watching Lady Gaga videos. He is probably all of five, and I sincerely hope that when he gets older, his parents will at least support him in liking whatever and whoever the hell he may like, and not just freak out over the fact their son enjoys glitter and princess and Lady Gaga right alongside his awesome sharks. Hey, doesn’t every parent claim they want a well-rounded child?)

Tom Wargo is another of those people that the world desperately needs more of — he runs a pet food pantry by the name of Daffy’s. My default emotion is generally just “oh my god I must go scoop up all the homeless animals” anyway, but Daffy’s story sent that emotion right into overdrive, and I cannot thank this man enough for what he does.

(I’ve been on every side of this coin, myself. All of my cats were originally homeless — and for a time I actually ended up homeless with my cats, too. But we found each other and we stayed together and I do not hesitate to say that doing so was the best goddamn decision I ever could have made. ♥ It goes without saying that I want other people to be able to make that decision, too.)

So there you are. A little bit of positivity to help get you through your day. Now go help make things a little bit less shitty yourself. :)

I finally had my first taste of Bradbury today — The October Country. (No, not Fahrenheit 451.) And even my boycat was almost instantly delighted:

I was sold from the very beginning, myself, from the forward about writing that spoke of May I Die Before My Voices. I sympathised and agreed and just continued to fall steadily more in love…at least, when my cat wasn’t using it as a pillow, anyway.

Reading Bradbury almost reminds me of some of the things I love best about reading Stephen King, only more polished. Poetic. With less man-eating cars.

Needless to say, I am a happy happy girl, and will undoubtedly produce more squee on this subject forthwith.

But the happiest discovery of the day was this:

Meet Halo and Nell, Boycat and Girlcat #2. (And please do ignore the incongruous smatterings of pink smeared about the bed; such things tend to inexplicably happen when I am involved. Please don’t ignore my puppy pillow-pet and beloved stuffed kitty Smokey, however, because they are cute and I would be sad.)

Now, Halo and Nell do not normally get on. At all.

It’s not through any fault of their own, really. Nell was a stray, declawed in all four feet and then dumped by some even-I-don’t-have-enough-profanity-to-fill-this-void into a goddamn New England winter. Needless to say, it’s a wonder she managed to survive at all, and did so with injuries to the face and head that I think damaged both her sense of smell and hearing, making her even more skittish and afraid than she was doomed to be regardless.

And she only did survive because some family happened upon her and took her in, giving her to their older mother to look after and take care of. The woman did so, getting her medical attention and giving her as much general attention as she could — but as it turned out, the woman was unknowingly allergic. No one else wanted Nell, but neither would the woman just dumb her off again, so Nell ended up mostly confined to a back hallway, where she couldn’t set off the allergies as badly, but she couldn’t be properly socialised, either.

But she also ended up on Craigslist, and I saw her, and I couldn’t say no.

I emailed the woman, who was bizarrely surprised — she hadn’t even thought of putting Nell on the site herself, and it was done by a vet assistant without her knowledge. But while she was surprised and intimidated, she liked me, and so we arranged a meeting.

Long story short (we’ll ignore the bit where she pulled up outside my flat and indicated I should meet Nell in her car, and I then willingly got into a car with some stranger from Craigslist because holy shit there’s a cat, shall we–), I liked Nell, too, and she stayed home with me that day. ♥

I can’t say that Nell liked me too, not then. Understandably, Nell didn’t like too much of anything, and had moodswings to match any hormone-addled teenage girl. (Ever hear a cat purr and hiss at the exact same time? Ever been viciously bitten and then immediately sweetly groomed? No? Then you haven’t met Nell.)

So I employed the patented Jacey Kitty-Taming Method, and gave her lots and lots of hugs anyway. (You think I’m kidding. I am not. Much like I will wander into cars with strangers from Craigslist for the sake of a cat, my reaction to a cat attempting to maul my face off is in fact to just give it a giant hug.)

You will also think I am kidding when I say that the patented Jacey Kitty-Taming Method works. But Nell is an entirely different kitty, now. ♥ She is still nervous and mood-swing-tastic, yes, but she both accepts affection and the fact that she wants it. She sleeps in bed with us — alternating sides to be nearest the one of us who is most awake, and more likely to give her pets. She sits and sleeps in my lap. She happily smashes her face into mine to purr. She grooms me more than she gnaws me. She lets me scoop her up and dance around with her in my panties to K-pop. (Which I do in fact do. I admit it. I’ve no shame.)

The one major issue still left unresolved was Halo.

Halo, bless him, is an extraordinarily stupid creature. He’s the apple of his mommy’s eye, to be sure, but even that kind of maternal adoration will not stop me from admitting that, yes, he really is that dumb. (His favourite hobby is eating curling ribbon, for the love of god.)

And so when Halo decided that Nell was a shiny and thusly deserving of being his friend, he went about making her acquaintance by stalking up behind her, attempting to shove his nose into her bum without warning, then crying at me in piteous confusion when her immediate reaction was to growl. And the more she rebuffs him, the more he cries, which probably just annoys her even more too. Then Extreme Pattycake ensues.

Lather rinse repeat. Every bleeding day.

She’s too nervous to trust other cats, and he’s too stupid to catch onto the fact he really ought to let her alone or at least approach her in a somewhat less obnoxious way, so you can understand my concern about these two.

And you can understand how happy I was when I wandered into the bedroom this afternoon, and saw what I did. :)

Because at the end of the day, what can matter more than things like this?

The more that I think about it, the more I am realising that I really, really want to start a charity to give books to orphanages/foster kids/kids otherwise in undesirable situations.

Because I think, when you get right down to it, that this is what I write for.

It isn’t why I write — I write because, well, I do. Because even as a baby I was clinging to books while in my carriage and the moment it first clicked in my tiny little brain that those stories came from people, that people could tell them for a living, there was absolutely no question at all that that is what I would do. I write because I emancipated myself from the womb to do so, and was only ever waiting for my fingers to catch up to my brain. (Even at two, I was dictating poetry to my mother, because I myself couldn’t physically write the words down. I was a very strange sort of girl.)

I want to write for the underpriviledged kids, the kids whose ‘home life’ has no actual ‘home’ to speak of, the kids who don’t have a better companion than the characters brought to life for them on the page. I want to write to give those kids a corner.

I believe, more firmly than maybe anything else in this world, that books and stories are the closest thing to magic that we know. They can take you away, hide you when you can’t bear to be found, give you a multitude of homes inside them when outside there are none. (I myself grew up in River Heights, in Yavin IV and Coruscant, in Middle Earth, in Hogwarts, in Luster.)

And I want to offer those children that corner myself, with my own wishes for them and words and worlds. I figure that it’s only fair; if books gave me so much, then it’s only right and proper that I start giving something back in turn.

And it stands to reason, therefore, that the next logical step would be to start such a charity, on top of the writing itself. Not everyone is an author, but I know I’m not the only one who found their true home between the pages and who now wants to offer that to someone else. And I’m certainly not arrogant enough to believe that my own worlds would be enough to suitably shelter every kid who needs them, no matter how good my intentions or how hard I try.

Therefore, a charity to gather up more books for them it is.

I don’t know the logistics of all this, not yet, not beyond the obvious of writing some childrens’ books myself and putting the proceeds from them towards this — and seeing if I can talk any other authors into doing the same! But I’m a stubborn sort of girl. I’ll make this work. (Tim Gunn is one of my heros, after all.)

No one can take all of these kids home. But goddamnit, we can still help to at least give them a home that’s theirs.